


eudipleural

by sprx77



Series: Soteriology [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alchemy to pilot Jaegers, Elric brothers being prodigious in general, Gen, Introspection, Short, as a general rule, working on it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 10:10:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5201927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sprx77/pseuds/sprx77
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The drift was always an afterthought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eudipleural

The Elric brothers never needed the drift.

It’s a fact, for all that it’s consistently looked over in light of their ever growing and ever more incredible list of achievements.

One alchemist alone cannot pilot a Jaeger.

Two alchemists need to transmute together; they need the drift for that. _They_ need the drift for that.

Rangers require complete and perfect synchronized transmutations. A transmutation is so much more than clapped hands and flesh contact with an array.

Anyone could do alchemy if all you needed was a circle and a clap. Circles would be distributed en-masse, recreated and passed out like candy—hell, on candy wrappers—if that were the truth.

No, an alchemist uses the array as a template and their hands as a conduit. They shape the _reaction_ with thought and calculation.

Edward’s transmutations had always been faster, Alphonse’s transmutations had always been faster, thoughts racing ahead of each other, bright like lightening, thirty steps ahead.

Everything had been so much simpler when they were two fair haired children too wired to sleep, piled in one bed with books piled beside them, sheets in a tent and a flashlight held between them.

When they played tag and played with arrays and spoke with quick tongues spinning quicker conversations of chemical formulas and compositions in code and codes within codes, when the Periodic Table wasn’t child’s play because _they_ were children and it had long since grown boring to recite, as basic as the first ten numbers when numbers are infinite, imaginary, prime, even, the digits of pi, formulas and functions and the handwriting of God.

If mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe, alchemy is surely the vehicle for human transcendence beyond God’s purview. What were they, if God had created everything and set them loose on the world, and they had gone on to learn and reason and transmute— _disintegrate,_ calcining what God built, shaping and changing and reforming _anything_ anew?

The cycle continues. God is surpassed by his children, as Zeus overthrew Cronos, as the student surpasses the teacher, as humankind will forever hurtle forward towards progress, skipping up steps where once their predecessors struggled to walk, flying where once man was bound to the ground without even stairs.

 _Chemistry_ is the study of matter, and matter is everything. Humans are matter. Cognitive neuroscience is the brain trying to understand _itself_. Tyson said: Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically.

All is one and one is all.

The world is the one.

 _I am the all_ , thought Edward once—and once was all it ever took—long before impossible, enormous horrors breached like the wrath of God from a dimensional rift.

We _are the all._

Alchemy is the science of breaking matter down and building it back new. There are principles, of course—laws and theorems and the like which filled the books Ed and Al cut their teeth on—but Alchemy is the power that surpasses God in the hands of children.

One alchemist, on their own, can do incredible things.

But he can’t pilot a Jaeger.

The drift, neural science taken to its most extreme, is a bridge that reaches to connect neuron pathways to neuron pathways; the sparks that fire from axon to axon are shared and mimicked and two brains become one larger brain when one alone was already a veritable supercomputer.

Drifting allows perfect, synchronized transmutations.

Amidst the long list of achievements and impossibilities and victories of the Elric brothers, one fact remains (salient) overlooked and undocumented.

The drift was only ever an afterthought for Edward and Alphonse Elric.


End file.
